"That is so true. I think I want to help with that."

"I hope that once the war is won, we will both find many opportunities to make improvements."

"Yeah...with so many dead things are gonna change one way or another. Might as well be for the better."

Yunping is a little past Yunmeng from the front. Wei Ying considers suggesting a brief detour but decides against, for the moment; maybe on the way back, if they need to fill more time of the two weeks. 

The graveyard holding the body of Meng Shi is a little ways outside the city boundary proper. 

He has never come here with another person. Meng Yao had wondered if he might regret it, once they arrived, if Wei Ying's presence would suddenly become intrusive.

Wei Ying is not intrusive. She is here to pay respect to his mother, who has never had enough respect in life or death. It feels correct. If Meng Yao could bring the entire cultivation world to kneel before his mother's grave, he would.

He leads Wei Ying silently through the graveyard.

When they reach the grave, she kneels and lights a stick of incense and claps her hands together and bows her head, possibly more serious than he has ever seen her before. 

He kneels, bows. Closes his eyes.

Mother. I have brought you my sworn sister Wei Ying. She is a generous person and I think you would approve of her.

So far the family I have collected in the world has been kind to me, so do not worry.

All of a sudden, pious and solemn thoughts are interrupted by a large explosion. 

Wei Ying shrieks and grabs Meng Yao, shielding the weaker cultivator from the worst of the damage as the ground under their feet detonates. They land and roll, and she rises to her feet, stepping between him and what appears to be a concerningly large number of Wen soldiers who shouldn't be here on so many levels!

Meng Yao staggers up to his feet behind her, dizzy and disoriented and furious. The ground... exploded, his mother's grave - 

That's a truly unfortunate number of Wen soldiers, all of whom definitely need to die, violently, and Meng Yao is definitely not capable of killing them all himself -

He huddles behind Wei Ying and whispers, "should we pretend to surrender?"

"Bad idea, this was not supposed to happen so I have the Yin Iron," she hisses back as quietly as possible. She bites her lip. "I don't have as many talismans as I'd like on me, do you think you can distract them while I hide it and set something up." 

Well, he can try.

(This unfortunately involves not hiding behind Wei Ying. Hopefully a temporary state of affairs.)

Meng Yao steps out in front and lifts his empty hands in the air. "Soldiers, I am unarmed! What is your intention!"

This is sufficiently baffling that he manages to attract enough of their attention for Wei Ying to--

...

There aren't a lot of great places to hide something around here. Some blown-up ground but, uh, that is kind of surrounded by Wens. She could try hiding it behind a tombstone but all that would require to be found would be someone walking in the wrong direction. There do not appear to be any convenient rabbit warrens. 

But...dirt wasn't...the only thing thrown by the explosion...

And she can't help remembering her own musings when they were looking for Xue Yang's piece...

Swearing internally to make it up later somehow, she stuffs the pouch holding the Yin Iron into the ribcage of a withered and blackened corpse that she's pretty sure she can guess the identity of and sprints off to scrawl something nasty to deal with the Wens with. 

Fortunately, he is not paying any attention to what Wei Ying is doing. He is busy being Distracting.

He'd like to talk to the commanding officer at once and properly negotiate their surrender, says Meng Yao, as though Wei Ying is not dashing around aggressively behind him.

This guy wants to know where the Yin Iron is! He is going to attempt to menace Meng Yao about this while some others try to undistract themselves enough to chase Wei Ying. 

Meng Yao has no idea where the Yin Iron is! Perhaps it's nearby to his sword, wherever that ended up after everything EXPLODED. If this officer provides some assurance of his safety, Meng Yao would be happy to assist them in searching for it!

Ugh, sure, fine, whatever, ugh. One of the other soldiers grabs Meng Yao. 

Meng Yao is pretty agreeable about being grabbed.

...it occurs to him that Wei Ying could have just run off entirely while he did this. That would've been a smart thing to do.

Maybe it would, but who ever accused Wei Ying of prioritizing "smart" over "fanatically loyal to her loved ones?" 

She ducks in, shivs the guy Meng Yao's talking to with Suibian in one hand while the other clutches a handful of slips of paper written on in what looks like for lack of a better writing implement she may have resorted to blood. She ducks another soldier's swing--

- and something much larger than a fist shoots by over her head -

And then the soldier who grabbed Meng Yao is flat on the ground with a bloody hole in his chest, and standing in the hole is a corpse, much less withered than it was moments ago but now crawling with ferocious shadows, black smoke rippling like flames across its body.

Wei Ying falls over in a sprawl, not because the corpse or anything else hit her but because of the sheer force of the realization that this is definitely the uppest she has ever fucked in her life. 

-- Meng Yao screams.

The corpse does not linger in the chest cavity of this one Wen soldier: there are many remaining Wens who also require violent dismemberment.

At some point Wei Ying is going to press her head to the ground and inform Meng Yao that she does not deserve his forgiveness but for right now she is going to have to solve the problem at hand. 

Unfortunately she does not have a great way of doing that. 

She's spent some of her talisman development time on trying to figure out if there was anything that could be done about the Yin Iron; she hasn't exactly gotten anything that's super likely to work, but she carries all her attempts whenever she has the Yin Iron. 

She picks a moment while the super-Yin-ghoul is distracted disemboweling someone who fortunately was gonna have to die anyway and throws literally all of them at it at once. 

The super-Yin-ghoul lowers to the ground and stands very still, face tilted up towards the sky. The shadows spin and flare before dissipating, slipping away into the air.

The corpse falls to her knees.